Inflamed rhetoric: Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah warns in a televised speech that Syria will continue to arm the militant group.
Photo: AP
It is just under seven years since the skies over Lebanon roared with the sound of Israeli fighter jets and missiles rained down on both sides in a furious 34-day war.
But the uneasy calm that followed the end of hostilities in August 2006 has been shaken this week as Israeli F-16s violated Lebanese air space to launch two attacks over 48 hours on missile stores inside Syria.
In a region where seven years can feel like a long time between wars, the twin attacks, which followed a similar strike in late January, provoked much speculation about how much Israeli pressure the ”axis of resistance” – Iran, Syria and Hezbollah – can bear.
Regional experts – and Israel itself – acknowledge it was not Syria the fighter jets were targeting but the transfer of ”game-changing” precision weapons from Iran to Hezbollah, a militant Shiite political and military organisation, based in Lebanon.
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But in order to understand this conflict you must take a step further back again.
For Israel, the main game is Iran and its nuclear program.
Over the past two years, the Israeli government has invested enormous energy in describing the ”red lines” Iran’s program was about to cross and attempting to push the United States into agreeing to a pre-emptive strike to prevent the program reaching a critical threshold.
”At stake is the future of the world,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the United Nations General Assembly last year, where he famously drew a red line through a cartoon bomb to emphasise his point. ”Nothing could imperil our future more than an Iran armed with nuclear weapons.”
Despite Israel’s urging, President Barack Obama has not laid out what constitutes a red line for the US on Iran and as the US and Israel focused attention on their elections (in November and January respectively), talk of a strike against Iran died down.
But it is the blowback from any attack on Iran that Israel is preparing for – or trying to avoid – with its air strikes on weapons convoys headed for Hezbollah.
For it is through Hezbollah, with its missiles trained on Israel, that Iran will retaliate.
It is a lonely region for the axis of resistance – the three are each other’s only friends and the instability inside Syria is drawing both Iran and Hezbollah further into the mire, experts warn.
Both have been steadfast allies to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a war that has claimed more than 70,000 lives, forced more than 1 million people to flee the country and internally displaced an estimated 3.2 million. And they all have a sworn enemy in Israel.
The three attacks – one in January on a military research centre in Jamraya just outside Syria’s capital, Damascus, and the two this week targeting anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles and Fateh-110s – were about Israel enforcing its red lines, says Salman Shaikh, the director of the Brookings Doha Centre.
”For 40 years there has been more or less a cold peace between Syria and Israel, and that has changed in a very short period of time,” he says. ”The Israelis – and I believe them – say they do not want to go beyond this and help the rebels.
”But although they talk about narrow interests, key Israeli decision makers – certainly those in the military – have not forgotten 2006,” he says of Israel’s war with Hezbollah.
An internal inquiry found ”very serious failings” in Israel’s conduct of the war. ”A semi-military organisation of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full air superiority and size and technology advantages. The barrage of rockets aimed at Israel’s civilian population lasted throughout the war, and the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) did not provide an effective response to it,” the inquiry found.
With its military strikes this week, Israel has placed its decades-old conflict with Hezbollah firmly inside Syria, and Shaikh warns it could spread across to Lebanon and to Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria.
”It is still very much an Israeli struggle with Hezbollah and its main backers the Iranians, and it is happening as the Syrian regime starts to wither,” he says. ”They will hit again if they feel these red lines are being crossed but they must know that every hit brings a response much closer.”
Shaikh says an asymmetrical, or indirect, response could be on the cards. Tensions could increase along the so-called blue line border demarcation between Israel and Lebanon or, given the already heated circumstances, along the Golan border with Syria.
The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, which monitors the ceasefire between Syria and Israel in the Golan Heights, is again in a tense situation after the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade kidnapped another four of its peacekeepers this week.
The brigade had already kidnapped 21 UN peacekeepers in March, only releasing them after several days following intense efforts to free them.
”It is testimony to the fact that Syria is, as one US official described to me, one giant big sinkhole and it will suck in the entire region,” Shaikh says.
”If these strikes continue it will be interesting to what extent the Assad regime can get the message to not just the Arab street but the Syrian street, and whether the street will side with Assad or whether people just don’t buy it any more.”
They will not buy it, says Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre. Syria is now almost completely isolated in the region, he says, which goes some way to explaining why Israel and its allies are so certain neither Syria, Iran nor Hezbollah will retaliate. This time.
”The Assad regime has put itself outside the Arab and Sunni world, they are now enemies of Arabs and Sunnis, so there is no love lost when Israel does something like this,” he says, and notes that both Hezbollah and Iran have significant manpower inside Syria, pushing the regime towards an ever-more awful outcome for a civilian population that has now endured more than two years of war.
Most analysts agree with Salem that neither Hezbollah nor Iran want to open a second front in the Syrian war and start a conflict with Israel. But most also predict they will retaliate at some point, possibly via an indirect hit like last year’s bombing of a bus of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria that killed seven people, including one of the suspected bombers. (A Bulgarian investigation found Hezbollah, including an Australian with connections to the militant group, was responsible for the carnage, a claim the group denied.)
For now Syria is content to ratchet up its rhetoric against Israel, with a cabinet statement warning that Israel’s aggression ”opens the door wide for all the possibilities”. And in a televised speech on Thursday night, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that Syria would continue to supply the militant group with weapons and spoke of liberating the occupied Golan Heights.
”Just as Syria stood in support of the resistance to defend and liberate the south [of Lebanon], we announce that we are with the Syrian leadership to co-operate, co-ordinate and liberate the occupied Syrian Golan,” the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted him as saying.
In the meantime, Hezbollah has managed to more than double the arsenal it had at the outset of the July-August 2006 conflict with Israel, says Nathan Thrall, a senior analyst with the Middle East and North Africa Program of the International Crisis Group, citing Israel’s own military intelligence chiefs.
”Israel believes the reason that Hezbollah is being restocked in this way is to prepare it to retaliate against Israel if and when Israel attacks Iran,” he says. ”It is very narrowly focused on Hezbollah’s capabilities and it knows it is going to be in a war with Hezbollah in the near-to-medium term.”
With Syria weakened by its own war, Israel clearly viewed its three attacks on the weapons convoys and stores as less risky than it was before, Thrall says.
”These weapons are significant because they are just so much more accurate than what Hezbollah was sending in 2006, so they would do much more damage,” he says. ”Clearly Israel is testing Hezbollah and we will see how much it feels that it can endure.”
Regardless of the likelihood of an attack in the near future, Israel’s military is on heightened alert. Despite decades of calm along their border, Israel and Syria are still technically at war, after Israel captured Syria’s Golan Heights in the 1967 war.
Earlier this week Israel temporarily closed its northern airspace to commercial traffic and moved two of its five Iron Dome missile defence batteries to the country’s north, near the cities of Haifa and Safed.
Whatever Israel’s – or Syria’s – intentions, the civil war is close enough to watch from a hillside in Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
It is impossible to miss the sound of mortar fire being exchanged between government and rebel forces or the telltale puff of smoke as the shells land in Syrian villages such as Al Rafeed, close to the international ceasefire line. Stray mortars from Syria have landed inside Israel, and Israel has fired back.
It is a risky game that, along with Israeli attacks on weapons convoys, has potentially devastating regional consequences.
”With all conflicts, you know where you start but you do not know where they end,” says Yossi Mekelberg, associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House and director of international relations at Regent College London.
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